Child E-Book

Mimi Khalvati

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Child: New and Selected Poems 1991-2011 combines a generous collation of poems from Mimi Khalvati's five Carcanet volumes with previously uncollected sequences. She orders her work autobiographically, telling the stories of her life in four sections: childhood and early adulthood; motherhood; meditations on light; and love and art, circling back to childhood in her celebrated final sequence (The Meanest Flower'). The figure of the child stands at the centre of the book, appearing in many guises: the poet as a schoolgirl on the Isle of Wight, or in half-remembered later years living with her grandmother in Tehran; her two children, now grown up; children in art; and an enduring sense of oneself as a child that is never left behind. Here is the essential Khalvati: exquisitely nuanced, formally accomplished, Romantic in sensibility; rapturous and tender in response to nature, family and love. Her poems, David Constantine writes, 'say what it feels like being human, the good and the ill of it, with passion, tact and lightness.'

Leseprobe

MIMI KHALVATI

Child New and Selected Poems 1991–2011

For my grandchildren

Besan and Kai

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications in which these poems have appeared:

‘Iowa Daybook’ was written during a fellowship at the International Writers Program in Iowa in 2006. A longer version was published online in the International Literary Quarterly, Issue 2, February 2008.

‘The Streets of La Roue’ was commissioned by Het beschrijf and first published in a Dutch translation in Vers Brussel, Poëzie in de stad by Het beschrijf/Uitgeverij Vrijdag (Brussels, 2009). It also appeared in This Life on Earth (Sea of Faith (SOF) Network (UK), 2009).

‘Afterword’, an elegy for Archie Markham, was published by Staple and in The Forward Book of Poetry 2010. An Italian translation by Eleonora Chiavetta appeared in Poeti e Poesia (Pagine, 2011).

‘Night Sounds’ was published in Poetry Review and in A Shadow on the Wall (Soaring Penguin, 2011).

‘River Sounding’ was commissioned by Romesh Gunesekara during his residency at Somerset House as a response to Bill Fontana’s eponymous sound installation. The sequence appeared in The Long Poem Magazine and an extract, ‘I never remember my dreams’, in The North.

‘The Poet’s House’ was published in Entailing Happiness, a festschrift for Robert Vas Dias (Infinity Press, 2010). It was written at Almassera Vella, where Christopher North runs writing courses, and appears on their website www.oldolivepress.com.

I am extremely grateful to Arts Council England for granting me a writing award in 2009. And warm thanks are due to Jane Duran for responding to the manuscript with such care, Myra Schneider and her group; Aamer Hussein, Jacqueline Gabbitas, Martin Parker, Marilyn Hacker and Alfred Corn for their friendship and support.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

SELECTED POEMS

I

Shanklin Chine

Writing Home

The Alder Leaf

Writing Letters

Villanelle

Sadness

Listening to Strawberry

The Chine

Nostalgia

Earls Court

Baba Mostafa

Coma

The Bowl

Ghazal: The Servant

Rubaiyat

from Interiors

II

Needlework

The Woman in the Wall

Stone of Patience

Overblown Roses

from Plant Care

River Sonnet

Come Close

Blue Moon

Boy in a Photograph

The Piano

from The Inwardness of Elephants

Soapstone Creek

Soapstone Retreat

The Robin and the Eggcup

Motherhood

Apology

Sundays

Tintinnabuli

Ghazal: The Children

III

from Entries on Light

Sunday. I woke from a raucous night

Today’s grey light

Scales are evenly weighed

The heavier, fuller, breast and body grow

I hear myself in the loudness of overbearing waves

Speak to me as shadows do

It’s all very well

Light’s taking a bath tonight

With finest needles

Dawn paves its own way

Everywhere you see her

Don’t draw back

Light comes between us and our grief:

One sky is a canvas for jets and vapour trails

Black fruit is sweet, white is sweeter.

And had we ever lived in my country

I loved you so much

This book is a seagull whose wings you hold

: that sky and light and colour

An Iranian professor I know asked me

All yellow has gone from the day.

It’s the eye of longing that I tire of

It is said God created a peacock of light

Why does the aspen tremble

And suppose I left behind

Finally, in a cove

IV

Vine Leaves

The Love Barn

Ghazal after Hafez

Ghazal: To Hold Me

Ghazal: Lilies of the Valley

Ghazal: It’s Heartache

Ghazal: Of Ghazals

Love in an English August

Ghazal: Who’d Argue?

Just to Say

Song

Don’t Ask Me, Love, for that First Love

On Lines from Paul Gauguin

Ghazal: The Candles of the Chestnut Trees

The Mediterranean of the Mind

The Middle Tone

On a Line from Forough Farrokhzad

Scorpion-grass

The Meanest Flower

NEW AND UNCOLLECTED POEMS

Iowa Daybook

The Streets of La Roue

Afterword

Night Sounds

River Sounding

Cretan Cures

The Poet’s House

Notes

About the Author

Also by Mimi Khalvati from Carcanet Press

Copyright

SELECTED POEMS

I

Shanklin Chine

It surfaces at moments, unlooked-for,

when the little crooked child appears

to bar your way: demanding no crooked

sixpence as she stands behind the stile

in her little gingham frock and the blood

she has in mind drawn behind her gaze.

Are you the guardian of the Chine?

(Perhaps she needs some recognition.)

Of course she never talks.

She only has the one face – dark and solemn,

the one stance – blackboard-set

and a wit as nimble as the Chine

stopping short at forgiveness

that could only come with time or power

or a body large enough to fit her brain.

Is there something I could give her?

Some blow to crack her ice?

Human warmth to make her feel the same?

Genie of the Chine, she reappears at moments

when I am closest to waterways, underworlds,

little crooked streams through lichen

and liverwort that end so prematurely –

though she is there, like Peter Pan,

or the barbed-wire children who bang tin cans

or the child you would have loved

like any mother, any father, had you been

an adult, not the child with no demands

for sixpences in puddings, pumpkins

on the table or any pumpkin pies gracing

homes that had you standing at their gates.

Genie of the Chine, she reappears

from time to time, when I am closest to myself.

Writing Home

As far back as I remember, ‘home’

had an empty ring. Not hollow, but visual

like a place ringed on a map, monochrome

in a white disc. Around it were the usual

laurel hedges, the chine, the hockey pitch,

the bridge. On one side, the crab-apple tree

with its round seat, whose name puzzled me, which

wasn’t surprising since everyone but me

seemed to understand such things, take for granted

apples can’t be eaten, crabs can be planted.

Writing home meant writing in that ring, mostly

to Mummy. Mummy had a white fur coat

and framed in it her face looked tired and ghostly.

I am very well and happy, I wrote,

meaning it. Sensing somewhere in that frame

a face too far away, too lost, to worry.

And why would I? Worry should keep, like shame,

its head down in dreams. Sorry sorry sorry

I can’t write anymore goodbye love Mimi

I wrote after only four lines to Mummy.

There’s no irony in that. I was six.

Right from the start, home was an empty space

I sent words to. Mapped my world, tried to fix

meanings to it. Not for me, but to trace

highlights someone could follow: Brownies, Thinking

Day, films, a fathers’ hockey match, a play

called Fairy Slippers, picnics, fire drills, swimming.

Even the death of a King. When my birthday?

I wrote at the same time, dropping the ‘is’,

too proud of my new question mark to notice.

My mother kept all my letters for ten years,

then gave them back to me. Perhaps they never

touched her, were intended only for my ears

for I never knew her then or asked whether

she made sense of them, if my references

to the small world of a girls’ school in England

had any meaning. It was the fifties. Suez,

Mossadegh, white cardies, Clarks sandals. And,

under the crab-apple tree, taking root,

words in a mouth puckered from wild, sour fruit.

The Alder Leaf

It is perfect. And of a green so bright

no other green has a say in it, fine-veined

and tiny-toothed, in short, a leaf a child might

choose to love, remember. And later, name.

Children love what is perfect, the best catkin,

blossom with each whisker in place. But sometimes

on a path they will halt and bend to a matted

object strangely furred, spun with gauze but numb

to prodding and hard as rock, neither insect

nor larva, stone nor egg and troubled both

by choosing and ignoring it or failing

to find something on a nature trail, loath

to ask but asking, what is it? learn nothing

of shit too late to name in retrospect.

Writing Letters

After chapel on Sundays we wrote letters,

ruling pencil lines on airmails. Addresses

on front and back often bearing the same name,

same initial even, for in some countries

they don’t bother to draw fine lines between

family members with an alphabet.

Those who remembered their first alphabet

covered the page in reams of squiggly letters

while those who didn’t envied them. Between

them was the fine line of having addresses

that spelt home, home having the ring of countries

still warm on the tongue, still ringing with their name,

and having addresses gone cold as a name

no one could pronounce in an alphabet

with no k-h. Some of us left our countries

behind where we left our names. Wrote our letters

to figments of imagination: addresses

to darlings, dears, we tried to tell between,

guessing at norms, knowing the choice between

warmth and reserve would be made in the name

of loyalty. As we learnt our addresses

off by heart, the heart learnt an alphabet

of doors, squares, streets off streets, where children’s letters

felt as foreign as ours from foreign countries.

Countries we revisited later; countries

we reclaimed, disowned again, caught between

two alphabets, the back and front of letters.

Street names change; change loyalties: a king’s name

for a saint’s. Even the heart’s alphabet

needs realignment when the old addresses

sink under flyovers and new addresses

never make it into books where their countries

are taken as read. In an alphabet

of silence, dust, where the distance between

darling and dear is desert, where no name

is traced in the sand, no hand writes love letters,

none of my addresses can tell between

camp and home, neither of my countries name

this alphabet a cause for writing letters.

Villanelle

No one is there for you. Don’t call, don’t cry.

No one is in. No flurry in the air.

Outside your room are floors and doors and sky.

Clocks speeded, slowed, not for you to question why,

tick on. Trust them. Be good, behave. Don’t stare.

No one is there for you. Don’t call, don’t cry.

Cries have their echoes, echoes only fly

back to their pillows, flocking back from where

outside your room are floors and doors and sky.

Imagine daylight. Daylight doesn’t lie.

Fool with your shadows. Tell you nothing’s there,

no one is there for you. Don’t call, don’t cry.

But daylight doesn’t last. Today’s came by

to teach you the dimensions of despair.

Outside your room are floors and doors and sky.

Learn, when in turn they turn to you, to sigh

and say: You’re right, I know, life isn’t fair.

No one is there for you. Don’t call, don’t cry.

Outside your room are floors and doors and sky.

Sadness

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness

Naomi Shihab Nye

With sadness there is something to rub against –

these, your words, for unhappiness is speechless.

Sad air breathes, at whatever altitude,

recirculating air. Rub it against glass

and the shape it takes is nothing but the melt

of breath. Follow it with your eyes along

the patterns of the curtains and it will trap you

in a leit-motif you can’t escape. You’re wrong.

When the world falls in around you, there are

no wounds to tend, holes to fill, no prop

of stubborn plaster; tenements don’t crumble.

I’ve measured the ceiling for the curtain’s drop,

metres are where I left them. When the world

falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,

something to hold in your hands you say. Like this?

this button? A grey that fell, just now, a trick

of heaven? No, it comes from my green pyjamas.

Happiness sews on buttons. Sadness looks for

sadness to couple with, not comfort. The minute

I lift my head from the page, my heart takes over.

Listening to Strawberry

for Aubrey (‘Strawberry’) de Selincourt

I knew it as the poetry I could never hear

without his voice to give it utterance

and the way it ran inside me was clearer,

closer, than the way it ran in others

though they loved it too, owned it too

but owning so much else, loved it that much less.

Owning so little now, I recall how he drew

it out with pipesmoke, through long crossed legs

out of the earth as if he, so long and lean,

were a brook for the vowels to run through,

knocking consonants like little stones

to quaver in their wake. Certainty can quaver too.

And still retain its faith. Outcast

in its deepest spells of orphanhood, the soul

can recall – through memories of grass

and place, a shaking hand on a pipe’s bowl

that indicates a turn of phrase – an undertow

to weather, a companionship that being human,

echoing high in leafy woods, confiding low

when at our lowest, deprived of human company,

makes deprivation sweet to bear. And for

those of us who heard him, in our girlhoods

when girlhood was still a word to stand for

a kind of kingdom, a wreath around our heads,

it was a binding that netted us together